It has been suggested that it is a male viewpoint to want to categorize everything, and a female viewpoint to want to view things holistically. This is not to say that one approach is better than the other, but rather to point out that there are usually many ways we can analyze the same information.
The binary viewpoint, where everything can be summed up by simply categorizing any item as “here are the things it is”
and “here are the things it isn’t” would, one might say, be a male viewpoint taken to the extreme. But if we follow that reasoning, we can think of the tenth dimension as the ultimate shopping list of yes and no answers for every possible aspect of reality. We are all moving within a tiny aspect contained within the tenth dimension, each moment we experience being the result of a seemingly infinite number of yes/no answers made back to the beginning of time.
If we can agree that our conception of time as a one-way
“arrow” is an illusion created by our unique point of view, then ultimately we can come to the viewpoint that the big
bang is also an illusion, as it is just a side effect of collapsing the tenth dimension with the very first yes/no.
The point at which we enter the tenth dimensional system becomes the big bang (that is to say, the beginning) for the dimensions below. The currently accepted version of the big bang is known as “inflationary cosmology”, in which it is proposed that the size of the universe increased by a factor greater than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Does this mind-boggling amount of sudden inflation not sound more like the flipping of a gigantic yes/no toggle switch?
To be clear, this is not to say that the observed effects of the big bang don’t exist, or that the extraordinary expansion described in inflationary cosmology didn’t happen. Rather, the point here is that there are other ways of viewing the concept of the big bang that would help us to imagine what
“before the big bang” might be.iv What we are describing here is not an attempt to disprove the conventional viewpoint cosmologists have of the history of the universe, but rather to provide another way of looking at the same set of data. If we analyze the history of our universe from the viewpoint of time being another spatial dimension which can be freely navigated within, then moving “backwards”
towards the big bang would, in quantum mechanical terms, be moving back towards the indeterminacy that is the underlying fabric of reality, until we reach the very first yes/no that divides our unique universe out from all of the other possible universes contained as potential within the highest dimensions.
In other words, our new perspective allows us to find new ways of portraying the events that appear to us as being the big bang at the start of our line of time.
The same data can often have more than one interpretation.
Sometimes that’s because one interpretation is right and the other is wrong: if we’re presented with the image of the sun travelling through the sky above a flat horizon, we might advance the theory that the sun travels around the earth and the earth is flat. In that case, there is a different way to
interpret the data (the earth travels around the sun, and the earth is so large that we can’t easily see its curvature), which turns out to disprove the other theory. Or, at the very least, we can say that there is no way that we can simultaneously believe both interpretations of the data.
But that is not always the case. In fact, there are many examples in science where the same data has multiple interpretations and each, in its own way, may be correct.
When Newton discovered the laws which allowed him to predict the orbits of planets around stars, and even the unusual elliptical orbits of comets, he gave the world a way of understanding gravity that would not be challenged for centuries. When Einstein revealed that gravity was actually a bending of space-time, did that mean that Newton’s equations were proven wrong? No. Both approaches describe the same observed data, but from different viewpoints. Although Newton believed that gravity was an instantaneous force across the universe and Einstein proved this particular supposition wrong, Newton’s calculations continue to successfully predict the motion of bodies as they are affected by gravity. One could say that Einstein’s theories incorporated Newton’s laws, acting as an additional overlay which helps to explain and clarify what Newton observed, rather than contradicting or disproving it.
One of the most satisfying experiences for scientists, it could be said, is when a new explanation or interpretation that supplants an old one is actually less complex. Einstein is quoted as saying that we should try to make things “as simple as possible, but no simpler”. The underlying thought behind his statement is that the laws and structures of reality are not random collections of information, and if it sometimes appears that way, it is only because there is a deeper aspect of the structures that has yet to be revealed to us. For instance, the “Standard Model”, developed in the 1970s, is often used as an example of a theory which (although useful) was a bit of a Frankenstein’s Monster of stuck together parts. 19 measurement values had to be entered as arbitrary numbers because they were not derived from or predicted by the theory. Despite its inelegant
structure, the Standard Model was a very successful tool for the prediction of new subatomic particles which at that point had not yet been seen. String Theory, if proven to be the correct vision of the underlying structures of reality, supplants and explains the Standard Model with a simpler, more “elegant” theory which shows where those 19 seemingly arbitrary values actually come from.
Newer, simpler theories that enhance the understanding of older, more complex ones continue to come to light. M-Theory, the current version of string theory, actually ties together what were previously thought to be five competing versions of string theory, and shows how each are only different aspects of the bigger picture described by M-Theory. String theorists propose that gravitational effects are actually the result of the exchange of so-far undetected particles known as “gravitons”, and that gravitons represent the particle that would be generated by the lowest possible
“note” of a vibrating superstring. If gravitons are eventually proven to exist, would that mean that Einstein’s concept of gravity being a bending of space-time has been proven to be erroneous, or that Newton’s laws of motion were no longer applicable? Once again, not at all. We would merely have come up with yet another way of interpreting the same data.
Similarly, in these pages we are proposing that any process we describe as existing across linear time has other ways it can be described. By the time you view the seventh dimension, where all possible beginnings and endings for any particular universe can be contained within a single point, we start to imagine how the ways of viewing that construct are not limited to starting at the “beginning” and tracing a line to the “ending”. There are many other ways of cutting a cross-section through such a fabric which are independent of our limited “one-dimensional” experience of time.
This means that there should also be ways of entering the system that are the “reverse-direction version”–which, in our case, would probably mean we are imagining a universe
that very gradually coalesces from the “cold death” of entropy.
In our universe, it seems that entropy is an inexorable process moving from the past to the future, from which we can never escape. One popular notion within modern physics is that the apparently unlikely amount of order within our current universe as we are now witnessing it is not, as one might surmise, because the universe has evolved out of chaos into a more ordered state since the big bang. In fact, it would be the opposite: physicists are proposing that the universe was ordered to an even more unlikely degree by the processes of the big bang and inflationary cosmology. The somewhat surprising conclusion of this viewpoint, then, is that it is this natural process of gradual decline, from order to disorder, from high energy to low energy, that is responsible for the surprising degree of organization that our current universe possesses.
This would seem to be proof that time can only flow in one direction. However, Steven Strogatz, in his groundbreaking book “Sync”, describes many instances where order seems to spontaneously spring from disorder in the universe, and in nature. While his theories of sync are, of course, based upon the observations made in a world where time flows only in the direction we are aware of, it is very interesting to imagine his theories when they are applied to a reverse-direction universe. In that context, a “cold death” scenario for the end of our cosmos becomes easier to imagine as the birthplace for a simultaneously existing reverse-time universe.
Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman proposed an interesting quantum physics concept which he called the
“path integral method”. Also known as the “sum over histories” or “sum over paths” approach, it suggests that any currently observed state for a particle does not have one but a great many ways that it could have arrived at its currently observed state. If we take that concept to our current discussion, we arrive at another conclusion that will take some getting used to. If we can imagine a series of yes-no
decisions that get us from the big bang to the current reality any one of us are now experiencing, that is only one of many paths that could have been taken. In other words, that multitude of branches that is presented through our choices, chance, and the actions of others, which becomes all of the possible futures laid out before us at this moment, is only half the story. There are an equally large number of fifth-dimensional paths that could have converged to arrive at this current moment, even though each of us are aware of only one of them from our limited fourth-dimensional awareness.7
Feynman’s “sum over paths” method of calculation is now a commonly used shortcut for quantum physicists who are calculating the current path or position of a particle. When all the possible paths for a subatomic particle are averaged out, one path will emerge as the most likely to have happened, even though there are many other less likely paths which the particle could possibly have taken. In cosmological terms, this theory can potentially be expanded to show that the reason we are currently experiencing the universe we are in may be because it is the most likely one to have sprung from initial conditions, even though there are many other less likely states which the universe could possibly be in. And, as we’ve already mentioned, Everett’s Many Worlds concept tells us that all those other universes do, in fact, exist. How, in fact, can we know for sure that we are in the most likely universe? Perhaps we are in one of the more unlikely versions: but because the other versions of our universe are inaccessible to our own, there is no way for us to prove whether the version we are experiencing is the most likely one or not.
7 As we discussed in the previous chapter, this is also a question of fifth dimensional trajectories. While it is true that there are many ways that we could have arrived at this current moment, there are also in our current moment certain futures that would be more likely to happen based upon what has happened so far.
So, a different past which happens to arrive at the current reality we are now observing at this instant would have a different set of future moments that are more likely to occur, and some of those future moments would be extremely unlikely to occur from our own current timeline.
Taken to human terms, the sum over paths method suggests that each of us have an infinite number of places in the universe that we could be, but that there is only one location that has the highest probability at any given moment. As one would expect, the odds of us being in our current position are defined by where we were before and whatever position we are moving towards. Interestingly, though, this means Feynman’s theory predicts that there is still a small possibility of other more unlikely occurrences to happen:
there is no way to rule out the possibility that one of us could at this moment suddenly pop out of existence here and reappear on the moon. While the chances of that really happening are so small that it might take longer than the lifespan of the universe for such an event to occur, it also has to mean that it could happen tomorrow. Like playing any lottery, it’s just a question of the odds, no matter how one-sided they may be.
It should be remembered, though, that our choices from the probability space of the fifth dimension (which is where we are constructing our fourth-dimensional “line of time” from) are much more limited than if we were making choices from the sixth dimension. The phrase “where we were before and where we’re headed towards” is key here, as that is what determines the likelihood of one path over another. In the fifth dimension, the potential for one of us to pop out of existence and reappear on the moon (or other similar unlikely occurrences such as this commonly used to refer to this idea in cosmology books by experts such as Greene and Kaku) can be acknowledged, but for any practical purposes the chances of this event actually occurring are so exceedingly small that it is really nothing more than an intellectual curiosity in the discussion we’re having here.
From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple”
virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire
universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept–our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.
Cosomologist Jacob Bekenstein estimates that if you were to digitize all aspects of the universe as we know it, it would take approximately 10100bits of data. That’s the number one followed by one hundred zeroes! So, if you were to have data storage in your computer equal to that amount, it might appear that you should be able to re-create and search through all aspects of the universe. It’s amusing to note that particular number, one followed by one hundred zeroes, has a name that was coined by Milton Sirotta in 1937: he called it a “googol”. That word is commonly spelled “google”
today. Is this a coincidence? It would seem we have revealed the ultimate goal of the world’s most popular search engine–that all aspects of the universe will be catalogued and searchable within its google-sized confines.
In 1997 the Argentinian physicist Juan Maldacena came up with an extrapolation of string theory that showed how a version of the universe could be imagined which is actually a gigantic hologram. This concept has triggered much new excitement in the world of theoretical physics, as it may offer easier ways of calculating the mathematics of string theory, and new ways of explaining gravity. But apart from all that, it’s also just plain fun to think about how it offers us another Matrix-like view of reality: what is the difference between an actual physical universe and one that is holo-graphically generated? The answer, cosmologists tell us, is that there would be no difference at all.
So, are we analogous to computing devices operating inside a gigantic memory chip of virtually infinite size? And is every entity that might be called a quantum observer actively choosing from the list of yes and no choices that indeterminacy sets before them at any particular instant?
This is one of the biggest questions we can ask about this whole theory: if all we are talking about is a constant throwing of the dice with no interactivity, no qualitative decision making, no desire for things to be “this way instead of that way”, then the entire construct we are examining here has no point whatsoever. If every event is completely random, right from the subatomic particles that happen to be selected by observation at any instant, to the massive infinities upon infinities we have imagined as we move up towards the tenth dimension, then why should we even discuss any of this?
This is what it comes down to: if we are willing to accept that we are creatures with free will who are moving through a fifth dimensional branching system of constant choices that then define–for each of us–the fourth dimensional timeline we experience, then to whatever extent that it matters, we must also be choosing the subatomic states that agree with the choices we are making. In other words, we are doing more than just “throwing the dice” in our role as quantum observers, and in fact each of us are actively influencing the outcome through the choices we make.
We’ll explore this more in chapter nine, “How Much Control Do We Have?”.
Finally, the binary viewpoint can fail to take into account that there are usually three rather than two choices available for any situation involving free will: we can act (a “yes”),
Finally, the binary viewpoint can fail to take into account that there are usually three rather than two choices available for any situation involving free will: we can act (a “yes”),